the chiraptophobia redux
by pozarpel
Summary: Naru and touching. Naru and kissing. Naru and sex. Mai would laugh if not for the headaches and the tears.
1. first night

The first night, they're kissing the way Mai runs down dark halls—hearts thrumming, muscles loose, clumsy, gasping. _Close._

Naru's hands are, as usual, solid on her waist, fingers splayed over her sides. Restless, Mai shifts and settles and resettles over his lap, so God knows it's best he steadies her lest she tumble off of him again. In contrast, Naru's stock still save for his pounding chest and his mouth, which keeps finding its way back to Mai's without rest.

In the haze of movement, Naru—thoughts distracted and thus dulled—concludes that his behavior is affecting Mai's directly. She's reading the signs like they're pasted straight from a teen magazine. If Naru kisses back in such a way, if his fingers twitch on her skin and if his lips press just so and if he doesn't break contact, then…

Then it's like they've graduated from mechanic reluctance and rigidity, and Naru is content (_as close to happy as he gets_) and Mai is finally inside the infamous Davis barrier, lodged in his heart enough to touch him a certain way. Except that things are not that simple. Even something as mundane and as supposedly natural as kissing, as _making out_, is just not simple. Or at least, not so straightforward.

It's not a matter of crockpot emotional walls and who's inside of them. Because if it's anyone, it's plucky, passionate Mai, but…

At twenty-one, Naru is steeled enough to show zero reaction when she sets her soft palms to his cheeks_, _regardless of the visceral pang of aversion rumbling in his gut. The intimacy is unprecedented, not asked for, and thereby against his express rules.

Perhaps a bit hypocritically, he decides to press his mouth against hers and shuts his eyes tight, tighter as soon as Mai makes a sound he's not sure he's alright with. _Noisy, she's so noisy_. Relief sloshes about in his chest as soon as she draws back and takes her calloused, lovely hands with her. But his thought processes are inadequately slow like this, and for a moment, even sharp-eyed Naru doesn't realize what she's doing.

Mai's taking her shirt off, of course.

He doesn't reflect on this. She stops, the fabric pulled up just below the swell of her breasts, as he tightens his stone hold on her wrist. His reaction had struck like lightning, clearing the air of all motion and leaving just two uncertain people breathing out of step. Slowly, she drops the hem of her shirt, and Naru drops her wrist like a dead rat.

"Naru?"

"No." He lifts his hand to his forehead as if warding off a headache, and suddenly wants Mai off of him and as far away as possible. "Don't do that. I didn't tell you to do that."

In the dim light, he can see the crease of her forehead and the downturn of her lips—she's indignant, of course, thinking _kissing is not a command-and-obey sort of deal, you idiot! Make out with yourself then! Damn narcissist! _

But moreover she feels guilt and shame, so there's no visible flare of struck pride. And as usual, Oliver can't get an accurate reading on the hurt she is bearing. He hasn't a clue. He shot her down like he always did, and like always she took up the place of the scorned fool, still loving and wanting by some masochistic impulse beyond comprehension.

Under his searching gaze, she is wordless. He draws his mouth into a thin line.

"Sorry," she mutters. "I didn't mean to make you…" _Uncomfortable? Angry?_

He sighs.

"This is why this isn't a good idea, Mai."

Her hurt and indignation hits boiling point. She slides off of him, straightening herself out with that emotionally vulnerable haughtiness that he typically could only smirk at. At least he has the good grace to glance aside this time. He holds his tongue with the legendary Davis restraint—he isn't sure what to say, anyway. Mai has already zipped him out of his comfort zone by leagues.

"Oh, really? Well, excuse me," she says, her words wavering with thinly veiled frustration. "You seemed to be liking it! It wasn't like-" She lowers her voice. "It wasn't like it was out of the blue. I just thought after something like a _whole year_, maybe…"

He crosses his legs like a gentleman. He flinches like a whipping boy. "Why are we even having this conversation?" he says calmly, in a tone that leaves no room for response. "I don't plan to dwell on it either. So just don't do it again." He wishes he had some tea to sip to punctuate this statement better. Mai draws herself up to her full height, folding her arms as she glowers at him.

"You think I'm an idiot," she accuses him.

"Have I not made that clear since day one?"

"Oh, real mature, Naru." She snaps her eyes shut. "I'm sorry, alright?"

She isn't sure how to explain it to him—how to say_, I love you, I love you so much that it disarms me and leaves me aching and bare—literally bare. I love you even as you do this to me, even as I run out of things to offer you, even if I had nothing to offer to begin with.  
_  
He saw it as lust, and maybe part of it is so; she doesn't see the harm in that even if it is a bit embarrassing. Mai only wants to share her bed with the person she loves. But Naru insists on separate beds, separate rooms, downright puritanical measures, and it takes so much doing just to get him to touch her.

She can see he cares somewhat, and she thought it would ease the pain. But Naru would never, ever love her like she loved him—not in the same way, not with the same volume or force or devotion. Not with the same tears. It isn't his fault. He doesn't have the capacity, he was reserved for magnificent, unworldly things from birth.

"I don't mind," he says flatly, the sigh in his voice again, and stands up. "You don't have to dwell on it."

She wants to ask if he'd ever feel any of that. His kisses had seemed so wanting. Her knees had felt weak.

"You make it hard to understand you," she says uneasily. "You want to stop doing this?"

He can just barely be heard as he moves to leave the office. Mai takes a hurried step after him, but stops—it's just like Naru to walk away when he doesn't want to deal with something! Still…

"I never said that. Now, good night, Mai."

The door clacks shut behind him. Yet another cool-headed escape by the impossible Oliver Davis.

Mai, left standing still with her fingers knotted in the hem of her shirt, is thoroughly confused.

A common side effect of dating-not-dating a workaholic parapsychologist, she supposes, and tries to dismiss the ghost sensations of his mouth on hers.


	2. first night b

When it comes to pumpkin people, there's no question— he can walk as far away as he needs to, there's always ground to cover and so much distance to forge. Without a single thought for pleasantry, Naru confounds those trifling people by second nature. He never quite does what they want: He walks away. He ignores them. He forgets they exist. Then they're the spectres idling in the backdrop, the things he couldn't care less about.

Mai is as close to the other side of the spectrum as anyone is going to get since Gene. (Naru hates to think of it like that—post-Gene and before, as if he didn't go right on living. Is he still hitched in mourning black, on his body and on his heart? ) He is compelled to acknowledge her even when the matters are not to his liking. Usually he can shoot down that sly impulse with ease and saunter on—there's always something to do next, research and study and business and book-writing. He's lifting a whole scientific field onto his shoulders, after all.

But he gives the Mai affair some special consideration. He does not feel warm in the slightest anymore, and thinking back to the instants shared in the library doesn't bring back the sensation either. He's glad for that—the light-headedness was stifling and unpleasant. Mai alternates between riling him up en point and making him melt. It deals significant damage to his ego. (_Maybe that's a good thing,_ a fake Gene murmurs at the mirror's brink.)

_No_, Naru thinks, leaning against the door to shut it behind him. He stills there, tensing up. It's not good. He is sharp as a knife and taut like noose-knots, he is a fine-tuned and formidable thing. Melting and falling are for pumpkin people, or for everyone who isn't him. He feels cheaper just having experienced such things, and cheaper yet for concerning himself with them.

He likes Mai, though. It is something more and less than a schoolboy crush, something that's worked its way into his feckless hands. He has piano player's fingers, yet when it comes to Mai, they're awkward and hopeless and all wrong.

All prior shortcomings weren't shortcomings. He was never any good at soccer, for instance, but since he never felt an ounce of interest for it, such a fault was irrelevant. Every fault was irrelevant. It was just another facet of pumpkin people life that was outside his worldview equation, stacked up with things like melting and falling and second base.

But Mai isn't a fool's game. She scratched her way to relevance. Naru cannot even consider extricating her from such a place; it's impossible. Single-handedly, she has made it impossible for him to live as he would have liked to, and it only took a part-time job to do it. Times like these he wishes he could have foregone hiring her. Even then, he thawed out just enough for ruin at the hands of pity, rather than the fondness that hits him hard now.

His fleeting thought: Maybe he could never have lived the way he wanted to in exact terms. No, definitely, he couldn't have given himself over to science entirely if he tried. There were always things he couldn't walk away from. Mai just happened to be the one that tipped the scale and stuck in like a pin needle.

Times like these he thinks in passing that they really have changed each other's lives. And maybe it isn't fair to want to take it all back, regardless of how it frazzles his brainwork and impedes all progress. For the sake of fairness, he'll admit it:

He does like the feeling of kissing Mai. He likes it when she falls asleep on him. He likes it when she looks at him and when she sits next to him and when she is happy in his frigid arms. At first he gave in to the corporeal nonsense because he couldn't say no, the uncanny multitudes of other things he just so happens to like about Mai wouldn't let him. She was really in love with him for years and he can freely permit the idea that he likes to see her happy; kissing was inevitable. Before the fact it seemed like a favor.

Then he sort of began to understand why people die and kill for this sort of thing.

His feelings are not nearly so strong, but they persist. He falls and he melts and he thinks if Mai spent a whole year around him like this to the sound of static silence on his end, then he can finally apply some paltry degree of empathy in that regard, too. But not enough.

The kissing and the holding is fine if it suits them both the way it has. Anything else is non-permissible and non-negotiable. It's all on Mai all over again.

That's his solution. He settles down into an armchair and cracks open a book on Chinese exorcisms and sharpens his head steady and straight.

The next day, she says good morning and sets his tea on the desk and it's their homely routine in the works, the slow limbo between hell-raising cases (those are the only kind Naru will accept, naturally.) She opts not to kiss him on the cheek. In fact, she doesn't make physical contact all day. Eye contact is sparse. She's slighted, or otherwise too puzzled to do anything until it builds up in an encore. For his part, he gets the feeling that bringing up the subject ushers in defeat, especially since he was so firm about not bringing up the subject.

The edge on Mai's behavior wears off shortly. (Being depressed, being mad, bouncing back—the succession changes little with four years.)

But days pass and neither says a damn thing about boundaries or breasts or boyfriends. It begins to come off as a damper. And as cowardice. The count draws down to six days—Naru's not counting— and then he kisses _her_, for the first time, over evening tea and case studies.


	3. second night

She doesn't take it well. The table clatters, the tea sloshes, Mai's chair makes a low scraping noise as she jolts up, palms slammed flat on the table surface. "What are you doing?" she snaps, angry-blushing-red. On impulse, she covers her mouth with her hand as if he might try again, when obviously he would _not _after such an adverse reaction.

Here he'd thought he was giving her what she wanted. And so he's forced to the brusque recognition that all these petty things might become more complex than he calculated.

She regards his pinched, pained expression with hesitation.

"Should I not have done that?" he asks tiredly. She resettles the table, busying her hands as she tries to construct a proper response. Being around Naru for so long has made her regret too much raving on impulse. She wants to be eloquent. She wants to demand respect.

No— that's already a lost cause. She figures she might as well do what she's always done and hope that it gets through Naru's thick skull. By some miracle, she realizes she has a higher success rate than most, perhaps because she strikes nothing and surges on anyway. A hopeless case.

"No, you should not have done that," she confirms, pitching a testy glare at him. She holds it to full effect, then crosses her arms and juts her jaw. "But I know this isn't your _area of expertise."_

The nigh-imperceptible shift on his face says he does not like that tone.

A clenching, tight silence rises between them, suspended in the midst of a two-way staredown, before Mai swallows thickly and lowers her gaze. Naru's eyes do a number on her as usual; and still he's seated with that easy sensuality to him, it's the color or the eyelashes, or the way they're so even and steady and brimming with gentle intensity—it's regrettable, but it makes for an unfair advantage on Naru's end. Mai has had no such thing.

Seeing this switch in posturing, Naru speaks up again. "Isn't this what they call 'mixed signals?'"

"Yeah, actually," is Mai's disgruntled reply, as she drops back into her chair and looks reservedly at Naru's chest.

He reflects on this. Then, calmly: "You're giving me mixed signals."

"No way!" Mai exclaims, vaulting forward with a severe look. "Don't pin everything on me. I meant you."

"How so?"

"You're just—you're doing, I mean, you—"

"I thought you wanted to kiss me."

"Don't say it like that!"

"I thought you laid awake at night thinking about it. Am I wrong?"

"You choose the worst times to try to be funny. You really do."

"It's because I don't have the audacity to screw off during work."

"Please, you've got more _audacity_ than _anyone_ I've ever met. And no, that's not a good thing."

She hears a deep breath that isn't precisely a sigh.

"Aren't we getting off topic?"

That's something of a surprise, coming from him. Mai feels able to look him in the face then, searching for that thread of sincerity that always lost her within the multitudes of caustic weirdness that constituted the body of Naru's identity. Really, it is that caustic weirdness that she wanted to love and kiss and hold, too, but that would be impossible if Naru kept skirting around their relations like a spastic ballerina. She needed to coax out his sincere side. Which is in there somewhere, she's sure, being just as stubborn as either of them on their best days.

"You want to talk about this?" she asks, and he frowns at the surprise in her bearing.

"I want to know why you jolted like a starving cat when I kissed you just now." The tone's a little sharp. Perhaps it's an unfair assessment, but Mai feels like he only speaks kindly to her when he's consoling her—scarce—and when he hypnotized her. But she took care not to let him do that ever again. (Even though it was nice, hearing Naru's soothing voice. She hates herself for weirdo thoughts like that. This infatuation sticks in her gut like burnt chocolate. )

"Well? What is it?" Naru says, trying his best to be apathetic—still, that impatience clears the indifference out, and Mai reacts by rubbing at her face worriedly, hurried regardless. What is it, what is it?

It's so strange to have quiet-loving Naru jump to fill the silence with his grumbling assertions.

He leans back in his chair, trying to remove himself from it all when he's at the center. "You don't need to be embarrassed about last time. I already told you to forget about it."

As if it was so simple! The nerve of this guy!

"If you're talking about it, you haven't forgotten," Mai accuses him. "Besides, it's not that I'm embarrassed!" Well, she is, but it isn't the requisite embarrassment to refuse a make-up kiss from Naru.

"Do you not find me physically appealing anymore after you realized it wouldn't go anywhere?" She hates that distaste on his question more than anything at the moment.

But she also notices he had looked aside, averted his cool-hot stare. She couldn't answer for a moment because she was so captivated by it, a sight as abnormal as a puppy on two legs: Naru looking uncomfortable during a conversation. Usually he was so well-held and competent during any situation, or he walked away before his discomfort could bear fruit. The twist of his mouth, the crouch of his brow, the cloud in his clear eyes…

Mai thinks back to his question, cursing her distractability, and then she feels incensed for the discreet implication that she was shallow. No way! She scowls at him. "I'm always going to find you physically appealing, you idiot. Don't tell me you're insecure."

He slides his gaze back to focus as if he'd never wavered to begin with, speaking evenly if not archly. "Farthest thing from it. Then, why?"

"Why? I'll tell you why." She squeezes her eyes shut, and in a swift, imperious movement, levels an accusatory finger at him. "You're supposed to man up enough to communicate before you man up enough to kiss me."

Man up? No one had ever told him to 'man up' before. He didn't hang around that kind of crowd if he could help it. He isn't sure how Mai can embody so many of the things he traditionally hated, and come out of it as someone this close. Not any more bearable, just not quite insufferable.

She doesn't look at him, turning her head up and tossing her hair, like her body's been possessed by the spirit of Masako Hara. Naru can't help but hold that sort of frank haughtiness with disdain—but then again, it's more than possible that it is his warped influence at work here.

His foremost thought process is _ugh._

And so the next moments pass devoid of words. He really is slow to come to it, as if all his aptitude's long left him. But he's firm enough.

"There was sufficient communication. I told you to listen to what I tell you."

And then there is balking. It's harsh. Mai's leaning over, slowly, squinting at him as if he's gone mad. It makes him distinctly uncomfortable.

"Do you hear yourself? Is your fantastic, special brain just rattling around in there?"

Naru edges out a half-smile, one without the slightest well-meaning. "That doesn't meet your standards for romance?"

She leans back in a huff, throwing her hands up. "Let me guess!" she cries out in frustration, "'If that's not sufficient for you, Mai, you're welcome to go—' Well, maybe I will—"

Her frustration gives way to a sort of melancholy. Naru watches her as if she might bite him. She is, after all, having a conversation with herself.

So this is a lover's quarrel, or the closest thing to it that Naru hopes he'll ever have to suffer through. It's made them both a little edgy, a bit insane. A tad stupid. If he's ever been a stupid scholar, now's the zenith of that stupidity.

"Look, Naru," Mai continues, exhaling calmly now. Conflict makes her fickle. "I never meant to…. to… _force_ you into anything."

He stands up. "You couldn't if you tried."

She rolls her eyes and shuts them as she tries, with difficulty, to pluck out the right and honest things she wants to say. "I never meant to nab your pity, then, oh great and infallible one. I love ghost hunting and I love— working with you. You're my best friend! If you don't want anything to do with me this way, then just say so, you idiot."

"You've said your piece?"

It's like she can't look at him. She can't concentrate on getting out of this unscathed if she looks—if she catches one glimpse of his face and knows it's over, it'll be over for her best brave face, too.

She nods. Her chest hurts. Her throat feels like a desert.

"Your insecurity is appalling," Naru says bluntly, and at that, Mai opens her eyes and swings her head left, because he's standing right next to her now, looking mildly pensive and, naturally, frowning. "How many times do I have to say, 'that's not it?' Are you really so unhappy?"

Mai grits her teeth and looks down, because Naru is simply _not getting it_. His elegant fingers come to rest on her tense jaw, and Mai whips her head around just to stare at him in total confusion—his expression, perplexed and troubled, is not too different at all.

"It seems the burden of proof is on me," he says awkwardly.

Oh, she's still balking. She doesn't get it, either. Her first boyfriend—her most important person—and he just had to end up being incomprehensible from a base level. Since this is a strange and dangerous frontier for both of them, she has to build her understanding of him up again from scratch. Not to manipulate him and not to deal with him, but to get herself in a vantage point to push him from behind towards the principal goal that she and Gene have shared for five years.

"Just do what makes you happy, Naru. That's all I really want." She hates the way her sadness slips into her voice, making the words seem a lie when really, really, that's her heart-held truth—if he's unhappy with their set-up, she doesn't want it at all, regardless of how sweet, how strong, how intoxicating—

He dips his head and kisses her again. It's more a clumsy graze of the lips, as if it were an accident, but taking no note of this, he tries a second time. "A physical relationship," he says, drawing back a few inches, "is not something I can't handle."

"I don't know about that," Mai says wryly, though it is difficult to be duly skeptical with her breath marginally off-kilter. It's the surprise. "It's been a year and you still haven't learned how to really kiss a girl, I mean."

"I just haven't applied myself. It was a choice."

"And now you've made a different choice?"

"Yes. Isn't this also what you want?"

She isn't sure if 'also' meant 'in addition to me and what I want' or 'in addition to the other things you want from me,' but despite herself, her mouth curves: the beginnings of a smile. Naru doesn't wait for an answer other than that; he presses his lips against hers, his fingers twining into her hair, his thumb soft on her cheek.

Her happy blush was a lot better than her shameful blush, he decides, in a rash moment of sentimentality.

He meant what he'd said—he had been holding back, hindered by his reluctance to become invested. So much for that. Now that he's letting himself, he moves like a person who loves her. Mai's heart thuds like a hummingbird's. She lifts her arms and locks her fingers behind his neck, tousling the ends of his hair, and Naru makes a face as he picks her up by the hips. He wobbles, furrows his eyebrows.

"Okay, okay, one thing at a time," Mai laughs breathlessly, landing her feet on the ground with the poise of a princess. Naru is kind of making her feel like that. With their heights better-aligned, Mai stretches up and kisses him again. His arms come to circle around her slender waist, and she realizes he really does have the inclination to be tender.

It feels a bit silly to have thought otherwise—as if Naru was somehow incapable, when it was only that he'd trained himself not to do what his instincts told him, not to touch and not to look. Because he wanted to focus on other things, or, because he didn't want to involve himself, or because this was only a sickness that masqueraded as feeling.

She misses the mark the second time, touching her lips to the corner of his mouth. He stops her there, and lowers his head, and she's very much confused until he kisses the junction of her jaw and neck. She practically jolts, not from the sensation—which is pleasant—but from the shock. "It's easier here," Naru says quietly, trailing his mouth down her skin, down the side of her neck, and Mai manages to bite out, "Are you going to give me a hickie?" to which Naru just glances up at her, annoyed.

"Just joking."

"Hn."

"I'm glad to see you're still uptight." He stops just before her collar bone, thinking _more than you know, _and straightens out again, cupping her face and tilting his head to kiss her again. It's almost like he wants her to shut up. That's too cliché, Mai thinks, and almost laughs, but this is a hard-going kiss. His hand settles on her bare shoulder, and she leans into it, into him.

"Do I still not know how to really kiss a girl?" he asks when they part for breath and space. She stares at him a few moments, and then laughs.

She's really no good for him. It's unhealthy that she riles him up.

"Best I've ever had," she replies sincerely.

"Don't talk like you're experienced." He flicks her forehead, and formidably ignores the small swell of pride in his chest. How trivial. But he's pleased and can't help that. "I'll improve."

"Try improving your personality first," Mai mutters, and while she's rubbing her forehead he closes his fingers around her wrist and kisses her again. It's almost as though he does this to prove a point, to get it over with, but at the same time, he's sensual about it. Sensual in his determination, or determined in his sensuality—that's Naru for you. She places a hand over the back of his head, curling her fingertips against his hair, and Naru takes his hands down, tentatively, to her waist. Mai shuts her eyes and lets herself drown pleasantly; her intuition says not to miss this for a second.

Before she knows it, and before he even has a clue, her back is rocked against the wall, his hands are on her hips, and their chests are touching with a pressure that comforts and alarms them at same time. Mai makes something of an _oh _sound, and Naru steps back to allow them room, catching his breath. That was something. He's not sure what it was, but it was something, and his concern with it outweighs the unfurling twinges of pleasure in themselves.

Mai looks bashful with him hanging over her, and he straightens out. If they keep going on like this, he'll start doing things without thinking, antithetical to every fiber of his being. He's no coward, and no robot, so this is acceptable to a degree— he admits to himself, again, that there's something about Mai in this context that is enticing. Well, he supposes, it's a feeling that was already there. For who knows how long.

Some things don't change. He almost shudders. Experience and realization come, no matter what, his fundamental opposition—his disgust—stood, and at this proximity and at this point, it sounded a ringing, resounding alarm.

"There's only one thing," he says, shuffling forward. Not to embrace her, but for emphasis. "Are you listening?"

She tilts her head up. "Yeah, sure thing, Naru. What's up? Problem?" She has the gall to slip her palm over his chest, pleased with the contact. It is almost about all of this has dimmed his finer communication skills considerably, and instead of leading up to it, even as he speaks elegantly, he blurts out—

"I won't have sex with you," and leaves it at that. Not _I don't want to. _I won't.

Mai doesn't pretend to misunderstand. He doesn't mean tonight, he means never. He avoids eye contact, but sees her purse her lips and stare sideward for a moment. Her sigh sounds, and nothing more. It's not a particularly heavy sigh, either, more like an 'oh? That's interesting,' and Naru folds his arms across his chest, his chest that had very recently been pressed firmly against Mai's… chest.

"I think I sort of understand," she says, her index finger stilled thoughtfully at her chin. "You're okay with—this?" Vague gesturing. "But you don't want to have sex with anybody."

"Precisely."

"Why?" She's very careful not to say anything embarrassing. It's tricky not to, she need only stick to the barest minimum of responses for the time being, but it's hard not to insist and prod. She doesn't want to be eager for an answer, doesn't want to push. And she doesn't want to be eager for the act itself, even though she has a maddening curiosity. _Why not, Naru? It could be fun. Why not, Naru? I'm safe. Why not, Naru? I love you!_

Yes, anything she could say would end terribly. It is trial enough to not get bright red in the face. She is trying to be mature.

"It's nothing important," Naru responds dispassionately, and Mai frowns to see him edge back into callousness so quick. He looks about as cold as it gets—more so than usual, as if they've fallen back to square one. It takes so much work to yank him out of it when he takes on his indifferent iceberg modus, and even though her heart stills and her head stirs with wonder and worry, Mai decides to let this one go. Maturity.

She makes a halfhearted noise of acceptance, somewhere between an OK and a mhm, and Naru directs a pointed frown at her.

"No, really," she says, waving a hand. "I understand."

He hesitates—does she really? It almost seems like it. Like she could have put thought into this and seen right through him.

But she doesn't seem to like doing that. She always takes him as he is, at face value, and that's just as well because Naru puts all he is on the front. Blunt and visible. If there are things he hides, it's always for a reason, and much more hateful than those who stupidly order him to man up are those who try to sneak and pry at his secrets. Crafty as he is, he hates it in others.

He doesn't think she understands. But it's not as if she needs to. His relief lowers his defenses, melts him down again. Mai finds his hand and holds it between hers, and he lets her, and it's odd for both of them.

"Don't look so grouchy," she says. "We're not going that fast."

His mouth twists. If she thinks it's a matter of "moving too fast," then she definitely misunderstands. But to explain invites trouble. "I don't particularly like moving slowly."

"We'll go as fast as you want."

"You so rarely end up doing what I want."

That's just the human condition. Mai's the factor of the world he can't control.

She laughs, sheepish, and in a moment of rash sentimentality, he moves to kiss her goodnight. Again. And again. And again.

* * *

(( I haaad to get this third chapter out before I started on anything else. Next part is my favorite part! So I'm excited to write it. Thanks for all the support, guys, hope this is okay! I really like mechanically awkward Naru but for the time being we'll have to say goodbye to him. I like that he acts uncharacteristically when it comes to sex- blurts things out and gets harrowed.

wow i hope they were both in character -keels over- i won't hesitate to rewrite and fix it if they're not!

because I'm a loser I also have a second Mai/Naru story in the works and I think it will end up better than this one because reasons uwu stay tuned?))


End file.
